September 7, 2015

I’ve just realised that I haven’t been paying any attention to the number of visitors I’ve had over the last few months, so I missed the moment when I reached the next half million. The count has now reached 4,571,856 – probably hitting 4,500,000 around July 6th – so it’s time to do another of my little summary pages to see if new topics have become important and old topics have faded to insignificance.

In fact, the top five remain virtually unchanged, though 4th and 5th places have swapped over.

Ratings over the last year

The figures for the previous half million views (opens in a new window) are very similar for most of the top 5, but “NOT IN” has finally lost its staying power (it’s actually down to 19th place for the year) though it may take some time to lose its position in the all-time listings, and “AWR reports” has dropped from 2nd place to 5th. The thing I find most interesting is the continuing interest in managing free space in tablespaces – despite the amount of time that locally managed tablespaces have been around and despite the claim that they should do away with the need to worry about tablespace “fragmentation”.

The number of followers has gone up from about 3,900 to nearly 5,400 but, as I’ve said before, I suspect that there’s a lot of double counting due to twitter.

August 4, 2014

The day has just started in Singapore – though it’s just coming up to midnight back home – and the view counter has reached 4,00,009 despite the fact that I’ve not been able to contribute much to the community for the last couple of months. Despite the temporary dearth of writing it’s time to have a little review to see what’s been popular and how things have changed in the 10 months it took to accumulate the last 500,000 views so here are some of the latest WordPress stats.

Ratings over the last year

The figures for the previous half million views (opens in a new window) are very similar for most of the top 5 although “Analysing Statspack (1)” has been pushed from 5th place to 6th place in the all-time greats; and “Lock Modes” has swapped places with “NOT IN” in the annual ratings. As the annual WordPress summary says: “… your posts have staying powere, why not write more about …”.

The number of followers has gone up from about 2,500 to just over 3,900 but, as I said last time, I suspect that there’s a lot of double counting related to twitter.

October 8, 2013

Once again the view counter has reached a vaguely significant number – some time overnight the figure crept past 3,500,000. So it’s time to have a little review to see what’s been popular and how things have changed in the 10 months it took to accumulate 500,000 views. Sitting in the lounge at Edinburgh airport I’ve now transcribed some of the WordPress stats.

Ratings over the last year

The figures for the previous half million views (opens in a new window) are roughly similar for most of the top 5, although last year had a big spike for the “Oracle Core” page which has had only 4,781 views this year, and there’s a marked drop in the popularity of the “AWR/Statspack” menu.

The number of followers has gone up from about 1,200 to about 2,500 in that time, but I suspect that about 1,000 of the difference is due to twitter and double-counting.

December 10, 2012

It’s time for another landmark. The blog hit 3,000,000 views on 30th November – but I’ve been too busy to do my usual analysis of posts. The latest half million took 42 weeks (five weeks less than the previous half million increment) and here are the latest stats on popular views:

First the top five across the lifetime of the blog (excluding the home page and opening menu) and the old faviourites haven’t changed:

A couple of old favourites (dbms_xplan in 10g and SQL Profiles (10g) have finally fallen off the top slots, and Cartesian Merge Join didn’t make it back after slipping last year – but it’s interesting (and not entirely surprising) to see how NOT IN is still coming up after so many years.

The other statistic of note is the number of followers the blog has, currently 1,197 (although it was 1,185 on 30th Nov – I probably picked up a few more immediately after the UKOUG annual conference).

The Cartesian Merge Join has finally been pushed off the top 5 in recent history, but perhaps that’s only a temporary effect while the Addenda to Oracle Core is still fresh in people’s minds. It’s interesting to see how many old articles are still popular reading, though.

The other statistic of note is the number of followers the blog has, currently: 828

November 28, 2011

I missed my fifth blogging anniversary by a month – my first post was dated 24th Oct 2006 on the topic of the parameter optimizer_index_cost_adj.

Since then I’ve posted about 670 articles (and deleted a few temporary ones) and drafted another 110; I’ve acquired 750 followers; and the blog has inspired a little over 6,000 comments. It’s amazing how time passes and the numbers accumulate.

To celebrate the event I’ve created a new category (see top right) of “Site History” so that I could label that first post and the various posts I’ve made about viewing figures and popular posts.

March 22, 2011

Well, I’ve finally reached another “landmark” number in the page views – 2,000,000 views (after four and a half years) – so it’s time for a little statistical summary for comparison with the last landmark.

Looking at just the results for the last 12 months, here are some numbers in different categories.

April 20, 2010

Although I wasn’t convinced by the 25,000,000 view figures I reported (temporarily) last week, I’m inclined to trust my page view counter which is currently showing a little of 1,500,000 page views; and, as I have in the past, I thought I would produce a summary of what’s been of most interest to visitors:

Perhaps the drop in popularity of the item on Cartesian Merge Joins is an indication that people are getting over the belief that it is automatically a bad thing – which is particularly important given the way that you are more likely to see them appearing in 10g than you used to in earlier versions of Oracle. (But maybe it’s an indication of a take-up of 11g, where the optimiser has changed yet again.)

Of course – while 1,000,000 sounds like quite nice landmark figure to me – I can always put things into perspective by remembering that one of my clients had already reached a rate of 1,000,000 page hits in five minutes several years ago; and then there’s a video on youtube.com of Susan Boyle performing for “Britain’s Got Talent” that clocked up more than 42 million views in less than a week.

September 7, 2008

Another landmark – this morning the blog counter reached 750,000. It’s taken a little longer to get the third 250,000 than it did the second – but given how little I’ve written over the last few months it’s still a pleasant surprise.

WordPress supples some interesting stats, so I’ve copied up the top three entries for populare posts. [Edited: I did have an icon to the right that I though would let you see the stats for the post – but you have to log in as me to see them. The point of putting the icon there was to show that these searches show a fairly uniform pattern of arrival, rather than occasional peaks]

The other item – an email, also arriving very early in the morning – was the news from Apress that they are preparing another print-run of Cost Based Oracle – Fundamentals. (The email said it was the third run – but so did the email they sent around this time last year so I’m going to call it the fourth print run).

June 1, 2007

Yesterday evening my page view count reached 250,000 according to Statcounter. (According to Wordpress it got there about 3 weeks ago – and if you include their figures for page views through feeds the figure goes up by about 50% .)

In recognition of the landmark, I did a quick trawl back in time to see which were the most popular pages; the two I picked up last time are still there, with a more recent page that overtook them soon after it was published.

In third place, published on 15th Dec 2006, with 2,570 hits: an explanation of why 10g (in particular) could leave statements crashing with Oracle error ORA-01722 when they used to run perfectly well on earlier versions of Oracle.

In second place, published on 13th Dec 2006, with 2,690 hits: my notes on why you might be seeing a lot more Cartesian Merge Joins than you used to in earlier versions.

In first place, published on 5th Jan 2007, with 2,916 hits: an article about bind variables – with some useful feedback from readers.